Vettel Explains the Reason Behind the Slew of Penalties

Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel is of the that he and other F1 drivers deserved the excessive penalties. He said that “whinging and complaining” was the main reason behind it.

The championship leader was handed a three-place grid penalty for impeding Carlos Sainz Jr’s Renault in Q2.

Vettel’s defence was that Ferrari had not informed him of Sainz approaching. But the stewards ruled that “being aware of the issue of rear vision with his mirrors” he should have come off the racing line.

Following the race, he managed to finish 3rd from sixth on the grid. Vettel was frustrated but felt that drivers’ actions in recent years pressured stewards into a too-stringent policy.

“I wasn’t told, I tried to look out for him, I don’t want to drag on about it, but… The rule book’s now so fricking big,” he said.

“I think it’s a result of all the drivers, all of us, I think we’ve more or less all been there, whinging and complaining, ‘oh he’s done this, he’s done that’.

“In the end you should let us sort it out on track, that’s my belief.”

Even Sainz admitted that the Vettel block in qualifying was accidental.

“I feel like this situation is sometimes more the engineers’ fault, not the driver’s fault, for not letting you know someone is coming,” Sainz said.

“I must admit if that incident didn’t allow me to go into Q3 I would be standing here a lot more angry, a lot more disappointed. But I did such a good lap in Q2 [anyway].”

According to FIA race director Charlie Whiting, the stewards used a database of all incidents and rulings from recent years to decide penalties.

When questioned on Vettel’s penalty, he said “I think it was deserved. Completely consistent with other decisions”.

Whiting also said that the stewards might focus on the consequences of an incident for others. Instead of looking at the scale of the perpetrators’ mistake or their intentions, when deciding penalties.

If that theory had been employed in Austria, Vettel’s punishment might have been lighter because Sainz still progressed to Q3.

“The impact was low, so if you wanted to take that path of trying to assess the implications of the actual incident then you could say, in effect, ‘no harm, no foul’,” he said.

“But that’s not something we are thinking about [at the moment]. We are thinking about talking about it, but it’s not something we do presently.”